I've been making big changes in how honest I am about my addiction and other things during the last ~2 months of what's a very different approach to sobriety and recovery for me, now almost 4 weeks sober. In this thread, I would like to ask specifically how you all deal with medical providers in recovery, whether it's relatively new sobriety or well-cemented. I never told a doctor about my alcohol abuse yet and plan to see one soon just to get a comprehensive physical, with complete transparency regarding everything about my alcoholism and recent sobriety. I plan to ask that doctor to run tests specifically to investigate issues that might be related to it and more, with the goal to have a good picture of my current state and optimizing my health more. I definitely won't have an issue with declaring everything to a GP like that, no fear of judgment or learning about the reality of my physical state that I can't overcome now. My question is more how people handle it with all kinds of medical attention we seek and receive, including any specialist we see for routine preventative exams, dentists, and so on.
What inspired this question: I just had yesterday one of the routine exams yesterday that I neglected for a long time. I was a new patient so there was a quite thorough intake of my medical history, including a question about alcohol drinking. Unfortunately, I answered the questions quickly on an autopilot and missed a few things that I regretted later, especially because the doctor and team seemed very nice, thorough and knowledgeable (not always easy to find a good doctor). Said I don't drink at all, but didn't mention it's quite recent (let alone the huge history of it) even when the doctor expressed some surprise and said "not at all, that's not so common" (but no other questions). The drinking is probably not too relevant to the specific exams and tests I had done yesterday, but in biology/physiology everything is literally or potentially connected, so it's not a very accurate approach to exclude something that was still all over my life just 2 months ago.
I'm thinking that from now on, will at least briefly declare I had a problem with alcohol to every medical provider at start (especially when they ask about alcohol). I'll just need to be more aware and not let myself switch to minimalist autopilot mode during those discussions as though I'm still hiding things. Then we can decide if it's more relevant and needs more attention/discussion. I don't really have any concern about how this information going into my medical records would affect me, especially now that I'm quitting a job that still pushed me to maintain a lot of facade. I'm on a holistic kind of health and fitness kick now that still needs a lot of improvement - part of why I have a bunch of doctor appointments on my agenda early this year.
So I'm interested in how you all deal with these things - just please keep the "no medical advice" rule in mind while discussing
